Recovering lost LINUX password

Depending if you can log into your LINUX computer as a root or you are unable to log in, you must choose different path in order to restore access.

If you can logon to your system as a root this case is easy:

Execute vi /etc/shadow
You will see content of the shadow file whitch holds all user names and hashed passwords. Each line corresponds to one user.

henry:$md5$e1LJ$hLVa$iQ3pXe0sxkdRaRFhy7Rpi.:15499:0:14:1:::First part is user name, after colon is hashed password, and after next colon there are other user information not needed in our case.

To start password cracking just paste one line into our order form .

If you can’t logon to your system, you have to go through several more steps:

First step should be downloading ISO image with Kali Linux distribution from http://www.kali.org/. It should be placed on USB memory stick. That way we can use it without installing it on your hard drive. Detailed steps how to do this can be found here or here.

Put pendrive into Linux computer you lost access to. After booting it from Kali Linux memory stick we must open the console window. As default Kali Linux is started with Graphic User Interface, and you can find the console in top left screen corner. Just click the icon called „Terminal”.

Probably Linux hard drive / partition contaignin hashed passwords is not mounted. To be able to read stored passwords you must make it browsable. For the purpose of this tutorial we assume that we do not know which partition/drive contains operation system, so we have to check all of them. Enter following command in opened terminal window: ls /dev/ |grep sd. You should get device list simillar to one pictured.

In linux environment everything is a file, so we must create directory in whith mounted drive will show up. For the puropose of this tutorial we created directory “partitions” inside directory “media”. Remember to create different directory for every mounted drive. To create partition use commend mkdir /media/partitions

Now we will mount all found devices. For example to mount sda2 disk you must enter mount /dev/sda2/ /media/partitions/.

If everything is ok. there will be no info, if anything goes wrong you will be notified.

Execute cd /media/partitions to enter directory where device was mounted. You can list all files and direcotires inside by executing ls –a. If you find „etc” among other directories you probably found system drive we were looking for. Now you just have to open password contaignin file in text editor by executing vi etc/shadow and you can browse through hashed passwords of all system users.

You will see content of the shadow file whitch holds all user names and hashed passwords. Each line corresponds to one user.

henry:$md5$e1LJ$hLVa$iQ3pXe0sxkdRaRFhy7Rpi.:15499:0:14:1:::
First part is user name, after colon is hashed password, and after next colon there are other user information not needed in our case.

Post in Same Category

Our mission is to provide highest standard cryptographic services at an affordable price. To be able to do it we have built state of the art computing cluster and reliable and fast software to be available to anyone. We also fine tuned dictionaries to be one of the best wordlists in the world. Our next target is growth. We will continuously develop to keep up with the requirements of our clients.